This past week was the Fourth of July – Independence Day; I hope everyone had a great celebration, and had a chance at some point to think about the meaning of the day. Forty-two years ago this day was the Bicentennial: the 200thanniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I was living in New York City at the time, and some of you may remember that a big part of the celebration in New York that day was something called Operation Sail: the “tall ships”: high-masted sailing ships from countries all over the world, which had sailed to New York and were moored in New York harbor and up the Hudson River, all along the west side of Manhattan. It was an amazing sight – I saw it from the window of a friend’s 20th floor apartment – and it set the tone for a day unlike any other I’ve ever spent. I was all over the island that day, and New York City was one big party from end to end, the whole day and long into the night: the kind of party where complete strangers become instant friends. As I remember it, what gave the day this particular feeling was the sense of gift that was in the air: an awareness of a gift that we felt we had all been given, and the exhilaration at what a great gift it was: the gift of living in a country whose foundation was not in geography, or ethnicity, but beliefs: belief in freedom, and justice, and equality as the natural rights of all humanity. Those were, at least, the stated beliefs in the Declaration. But if we’re really going to celebrate them – and we should, we need regularly to refresh our memory of what it is that America really stands for, and that’s cause for celebration – if we’re going to do this truthfully, we have to acknowledge that over the course of our history we have lived up to these beliefs imperfectly, to say the least. It took us almost 90 years to get rid of slavery; it took us almost 150 years to give women the right to vote. And we certainly have not solved the problems of racism and sexism, and those are just two of the many cultural forces in human society which tend to stack the deck against freedom, and justice, and equality, for all. Now, why am I going on and on in what’s supposed to be a sermon about stuff that’s entirely secular? Well, the truth is that it’s not entirely secular. Actually, the truth is that it’s not secular at all. The gifts of freedom and justice and equality that we talk about in human society – anywhere, not just in this country – those are gifts of God: they are born in the Spirit of God. And the extent to which we are more and less successful in making these gifts of freedom and justice and equality real in our lives is the extent to which we live by the knowledge that they’re gifts of God. It’s the kind of thing we’re talking about in the Lord’s Prayer when we say, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. And we are the ones through whom God’s kingdom comes, through whom God’s will is done We will always do this imperfectly, of course, because we’re human; but we work on it (that’s part of what we do here in church.) In our lectionary there’s a set of scripture readings prescribed specifically for Independence Day. But these readings are not about independence at all: they’re entirely about our dependence on God. There’s a reading from Deuteronomy in which Moses, having just come down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments, tells the nation of Israel, “You shall fear the Lord your God, him alone shall you worship”; God “who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers”: that’s justice and equality, all coming from God. There’s a reading from the letter to the Hebrews which talks about Abraham, setting out for the land God promised him, who “looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” And finally the gospel reading is from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, the passage that begins with Jesus’ most impossible command: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven”: so that we may live more truthfully toward the one who is the source of our being. In all of life - including our lives as citizens, of this nation and of the world - we begin with the knowledge of our absolute dependence on God. And this dependence is neither imprisonment, nor helplessness: rather, in this dependence, we find real empowerment, and true freedom. This is precisely what Paul is talking about in today’s reading from 2 Corinthians, and in particular the verse that is the most glorious irony in the New Testament: “whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” And the reason it’s important to understand this is that this is how freedom, and justice, and equality enter our world: from God, through us. The passage is from a long section of the letter in which Paul is addressing a challenge to his authority in the church he founded in Corinth: people have been saying, Why should we pay attention to this guy, who does he think he is? Paul has to address this because it was a question of the survival of the gospel. Remember, there was no formal church structure, no New Testament, it was just people talking about this man Jesus, and how did anyone know who to trust about all that? So Paul has to list his credentials for the Corinthians, which drives him crazy, to have to boast this way. All through this section he repeats things like, “I am speaking as a fool”, “I am talking like a madman”: because he knows it’s not his authority or anybody else’s, that means anything at all; but only the power of God. This all culminates in today’s reading, in which Paul talks about a particular mystical spiritual experience he had (apparently whoever was challenging him had said “Our out-of-body experience was much better than yours”); and he says that God, to keep him from being too proud about this, had given him a “thorn…in the flesh, a messenger from Satan to torment me.” We don’t know what this means, whether is was something physical or psychological; we just know that, whatever it was, was something he couldn’t get rid of on his own, and he prayed to God, three times, to take away. And God said no. But God never says just no, God’s always saying something more; and what Paul heard in God’s “no” here was (as we heard today), “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” God’s power is fulfilled in our weakness: our knowledge of our dependence on God. It’s God’s power, not ours, that’s real; that works in the world. God’s power can work through us, but only when we live in the awareness that it’s God’s power, not ours. Paul states this: “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” And this is how he can sum up the whole thing at the end of the passage: “…for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” That “whenever” is important: because it shows he knows there are times when he forgets this, he thinks he’s not weak –Paul’s a Type A if ever there was one - he forgets his dependence on God: the way we all do. And when that happens we just get in the way, we gum up the works, we stumble over our own feet. This is the mystery of how the Holy Spirit works with us: as we get ourselves – our needs, our correctness - out of the way, we make room for God to work through us, and in the process become most truly ourselves, the unique human God created each of us to be. Whenever we are weak, we are strong. This is how, through us, God brings into the world the freedom, and justice, and equality which exist full and perfect in God’s kingdom, and which this wonderful country which we were all given the gift of birth into, was intended to embody. Thanks be to God.